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Topic: For those planning to bug in... (Read 3557 times)

Thought for the day - if your home is connected to a municipal waste treatment facility, you may wish to at least give some consideration to the following:

In the simplest form of municipal sewage disposal, gravity alone moves effluvium from high Point A at the furtherest end of the line, to Point C, (the treatment plant) at it's lowest. B1, B2, and B3 in descending order, represent the homes and businesses between Point A and Point C. No power? No problem, everything continues to move on down the line and out into the river/bay/you name it.

Unfortunately, if there are such ideal systems, they must be few and far between. Rather than a nice straight inclined plane from Point A to Point C, all along the line there will be dips and bumps and every place the sewage needs to go over a hill, of necessity, there will be a pumping station. Now when the power goes out and Point A flushes, someone, it could be B1 or B1001, at or near the low point before the pumping station, will have a very unpleasant surprise.*

* While there are check valves to keep sewage from flowing backwards in the main lines, to my knowledge, at least around here, check valves to keep sewage from backing up into individual homes are uncommon to nonexistent.

Do I treat Glocks like I treat my lawn mowers? No, I treat them worse. I treat my defensive weapons like my fire extinguishers and smoke detector - annual maintenance and I expect them to work when needed

Or, if you have a septic tank, you should be OK.....but when was the last time it was pumped out?

Exactly. I was at my brother's house doing some preventative maintenance (hoses and belt) on my car (he has a "Garage Mahal") and his wife came in and asked if I could do some plunger work on a toilet for her. (My brother was at work.) I said sure, what's the problem? She was washing clothes and her downstairs toilet backed up. I told her no problem, I'd do it, but I thought it was pointless as I'd bet the problem was with their septic drainage. Long story short, several thousand dollars were required to repair the problem, including a new tank system that met the new building codes, yada, yada...

My dad's folks lived outside Trenton, N.J. where, because of the soil type (nearly pure sand) houses had had cesspools rather than septic tanks. The cesspools were essentially large underground holding tanks that were pumped out or "dipped" when full. When I was a kid, there were a couple of men who came by periodically to dip tanks by hand. In later years, I am sure the tanks would have been pumped like septic tanks are.

Be that as it may, were we to have septic problems during a SHTF situation, the covers on septic tanks are easy enough to remove and I would have no qualms about "dip, dump and cover" in a hole pre-dug a good long distance from the well.

Since septic tanks sit almost full all the time (by design), a passive tank/system is going to be fine in most cases in a power outage. At my old house we put in a new system & it had a effluent filter & pump to get the crap out to an elevated bed. One of these would over flow quickly without power to run the pump... So beware, people with newer systems. In an outage, you have a problem.

As for the original point of this thread...... I had never really thought about it much. Something to think about for people bugging in when in the city!